Maiden Voyages

by Mary Morris

  There was also a stew of meat in shreds with rice and pale brown gravy. I had asked what kind of deer it was tied to the tree; Pepe had answered in Spanish, “Gama.” Now they told us this was gama too, stewed. I suspect the word means merely game or venison. At any rate, I heard that the village dogs had cornered another deer just yesterday, and it was this deer which we were now eating in full sight of the whole article. It was good. I was surprised at its tenderness. But it is a fact that high levels of lactic acid, which builds up in muscle tissues during exertion, tenderizes.

  After the fish and meat we ate bananas fried in chunks and served on a tray; they were sweet and full of flavor. I felt terrific. My shirt was wet and cool from swimming; I had had a night’s sleep, two decent walks, three meals, and a swim—everything tasted good. From time to time each one of us, separately, would look beyond our shaded roof to the sunny spot where the deer was still convulsing in the dust. Our meal completed, we walked around the deer and back to the boats.

  That night I learned that while we were watching the deer, the others were watching me.

  We four North Americans grew close in the jungle in a way that was not the usual artificial intimacy of travelers. We liked each other. We stayed up all that night talking, murmuring, as though we rocked on hammocks slung above time. The others were from big cities: New York, Washington, Boston. They all said that I had no expression on my face when I was watching the deer—or at any rate, not the expression they expected.

  They had looked to see how I, the only woman, and the youngest, was taking the sight of the deer’s struggles. I looked detached, apparently, or hard, or calm, or focused, still. I don’t know. I was thinking. I remember feeling very old and energetic. I could say like Thoreau that I have traveled widely in Roanoke, Virginia. I have thought a great deal about carnivorousness; I eat meat. These things are not issues; they are mysteries.

  Gentlemen of the city, what surprises you? That there is suffering here, or that I know it?

  We lay in the tent and talked. “If it had been my wife,” one man said with special vigor, amazed, “she wouldn’t have cared what was going on; she would have dropped everything right at that moment and gone in the village from here to there to there, she would not have stopped until that animal was out of its suffering one way or another. She couldn’t bear to see a creature in agony like that.”

  I nodded.

  Now I am home. When I wake I comb my hair before the mirror above my dresser. Every morning for the past two years I have seen in that mirror, beside my sleep-softened face, the blackened face of a burnt man. It is a wire-service photograph clipped from a newspaper and taped to my mirror. The caption reads: “Alan McDonald in Miami hospital bed.” All you can see in the photograph is a smudged triangle of face from his eyelids to his lower lip; the rest is bandages. You cannot see the expression in his eyes; the bandages shade them.

  The story, headed MAN BURNED FOR SECOND TIME, begins:

  “Why does God hate me?” Alan McDonald asked from his hospital bed.

  “When the gunpowder went off, I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I just couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘No, God couldn’t do this to me again.’ ”

  He was in a burn ward in Miami, in serious condition. I do not even know if he lived. I wrote him a letter at the time, cringing.

  He had been burned before, thirteen years previously, by flaming gasoline. For years he had been having his body restored and his face remade in dozens of operations. He had been a boy, and then a burnt boy. He had already been stunned by what could happen, by how life could veer.

  Once I read that people who survive bad burns tend to go crazy; they have a very high suicide rate. Medicine cannot ease their pain; drugs just leak away, soaking the sheets, because there is no skin to hold them in. The people just lie there and weep. Later they kill themselves. They had not known, before they were burned, that the world included such suffering, that life could permit them personally such pain.

  This time a bowl of gunpowder had exploded on McDonald.

  “I didn’t realize what had happened at first,” he recounted. “And then I heard that sound from 13 years ago. I was burning. I rolled to put the fire out and I thought, ‘Oh God, not again.’

  “If my friend hadn’t been there, I would have jumped into a canal with a rock around my neck.”

  His wife concludes the piece, “Man, it just isn’t fair.”

  I read the whole clipping again every morning. This is the Big Time here, every minute of it. Will someone please explain to Alan McDonald in his dignity, to the deer at Providencia in his dignity, what is going on? And mail me the carbon.

  When we walked by the deer at Providencia for the last time, I said to Pepe, with a pitying glance at the deer, “Pobrecito”—“poor little thing.” But I was trying out Spanish. I knew at the time it was a ridiculous thing to say.

  LEILA PHILIP

  (1962–)

  Leila Philip followed Mrs. Bridges’s credo “the sooner one falls into the ways of a country the better” in her poetic memoir of learning the potters craft in Japan, The Road Through Miyama. In the excerpt that follows Philip spends a day off from her apprenticeship and learns how to harvest rice with the women of the village. Unlike many contemporary travel writers, who include a lot of self-reflection in their narrative, Philip, as a student of the culture, concentrates on accurately recording the customs of a people hidden from Western view. She lived in Miyama from 1983 to 1985 and graduated from Princeton University’s Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies programs in 1986. A graduate of Columbia University’s Masters Program in Creative Writing, she lives in New York City.

  from THE ROAD THROUGH MIYAMA

  I walk down the path to Nagata-san’s white house on the corner. The October air smells musty and sweet, not unlike the fall scent of an orchard, but tinged with the sharp odor of distant fire and smoke. Through the tall stands of still bamboo a pale morning light filters down over spreading cinnamon leaf and scattered fern. A quick gray cat leaps across the narrow bamboo-lined pathway, a fish bone dangling from its jaws. Seven-thirty on a Sunday morning. Reiko is busy dyeing leatherwork in the yard, her wide brush leaving trails of scarlet, indigo, magenta, sunflower-yellow and brown. Just inside the glass doors to the living room–gallery Nagayoshi-san sits cross-legged before a pile of wooden boxes, signing each one with steady strokes of his cat-hair brush. Most Miyama households are still sleeping or lingering over breakfast; tourist buses won’t start arriving until after nine. Miyama’s tailless cats scratch through garbage heaps, compost piles, yards and kitchen doorways for scattered fish bones, their quick eyes bright, watchful. As I walk I scan the fern for broken teapots, chipped plates, old black vats—over three hundred years of pottery history flung into the forest. Pieces of twig and coin-sized potsherds crunch underfoot. My footsteps echo in the still green like the steady fall of hoofbeats on gravel.

  Surrounded by a well-swept yard and a low hedge of tea, Nagatasan’s house rises on the corner among thick poles of bamboo. Black vats, some of them chest-high, bulge with rainwater, wooden-handled plastic scoops, broken ends of tools, slim bamboo poles, a forgotten plastic sandal, extra gloves and lengths of rope. Others have become planters for stout miniature plum trees. One large kuromon vat leans against the house under a sheet of corrugated metal that covers a Toshiba air conditioner. Built five years ago, the modern stucco house stands on land once occupied by a small wood-firing kiln used by Nagata-san’s husband, who died many years ago. In the back, the gray tile-roofed house connects with a low wooden shed that was once his workshop. Inside, waist-high black kame, crocks that once held glaze, still line the walls. But the potter’s old kick wheel, split at the base and covered with mold, lies overturned in one corner.

  When I arrive, Nagata-san is stepping down from the tiled entrance with a round bundle wrapped in a green-and-blue cloth, the size of a stuffed laundry bag. Concentrating on her load, she mumbles a rough complaining monolog
ue—“Bad weather!”—and shuffles over to a wooden wheelbarrow piled high with similar bundles wrapped in newspaper or faded pastel cloths of red, green and blue. Several pairs of brown chopsticks poke up amid coils of rope, and a clump of bright yellow bananas crowns the precarious load. Part of the payment for laboring in the fields is food; I wonder how many obāsan will help in Nagata-san’s field today.

  “Good morning, it’s Leila,” I call across the hedge as loudly as I can without rousing Nagata-san’s irritable neighbor, the obāsan with bulging black marble eyes. Nagata-san places the last bag on top with a thump and squints toward the lane. Her face relaxes, then opens into a thin smile.

  “Good morning. Early, aren’t you?”

  “I’ve come to help with the rice harvest,” I say. “Aren’t you going to the fields today?”

  “Oh yes, but it’s hard work. You’d be of no use.”

  “Look, I’ve borrowed boots for the rice paddy,” I answer quickly, holding up one leg to show off the blue rubber cloven-toe boots that fit tightly around the ankle and pull up over my lower calf, sealing in the bottoms of my baggy mompei. “I have the day off.” At the sight of my crab-claw feet Nagata-san’s narrow eyes become bright, the lines across her brow quiver, her head shakes. I realize she is laughing at my outfit. Above my mompei, the long sleeves of a black cotton shirt are tucked into white cotton gloves. Dressed for work in the rice fields, I’ve hidden my yellow hair under a maroon bandanna. Only a pale face and blue gaijin eyes show. I could almost pass for a younger Nagata-san. Her lopsided smile suddenly vanishes, the shaking stops, her whole face tarnishes like copper, twisting into a long frown.

  “Come on, then, and be quick, we’re already late. Here, carry these.” A long-sleeved shirt and a loose apron of sky-blue cover her front, while a white towel tied at the corners forms a loose tentlike sunshade for her head. Her mompei are the plaid design of small blue and white checks with flecks of yellow worn by older farming and pottery women. Like mine, her feet are bound in thin-soled tight-fitting boots that stay on even in the deep gluey mud of the rice fields.

  “Yōka! Let’s go,” she shouts, handing me a green thermos of hot water, a length of straw rope, extra pairs of white cotton gloves, and a short saw-edged sickle over the hedge. Grasping the handles of the wheelbarrow with both gloved hands, Nagata-san bends into the load, half shoving it out of the yard and down the lane. Up the path we stop at a laden persimmon tree to gather some of the soft orange fruit before heading on. Despite her crooked gait, her stride behind the heavy load is light and quick and I have to walk briskly to keep up.

  By the moon-shaped mulberry fields at the corner we pass the low stone marker for Ta no kami, the guardian deity of the field, small blue-and-white cups of water or clear shōchū resting on its ledge. The front bears the grinning face of what looks like a hobo under a mushroom-shaped hood. From the back it is shaped to resemble a large phallus. Markers like these line the fields throughout Kagoshima, and in many places a stone or wood phallus is enshrined, adding to the region’s reputation for feudal, patriarchal attitudes. While an urban women’s movement slowly grows, Kagoshima staunchly preserves its conservative ways. In Miyama, although women work in the potteries, workshop owners are all men, and there are no recognized female “master” craftsmen in the village. Reiko says that when she first moved to Miyama from Tokyo, older women scolded her for not hanging her husband’s laundry on separate lines from her own “impure” clothing.

  We turn onto the main road to the coast. In the west slim rays of sun slice through the clouds, shining over the waves in streaks of shimmering gold. Across Miyama the sky is a sullen lead-gray.

  “Bad weather,” grumbles Nagata-san in local slang. Though she can understand my standard Japanese, she speaks the rough, uneven Kagoshima ben. Young people don’t learn the dialect, saying that they don’t want to sound like hicks, but it is still the common speech of village elders. And although Kobe-born Reiko won’t have it spoken in the house, in the workshop Nagayoshi-san talks on the phone to his mother and brother in nearby Sendai, to friends and even to me in the thick dialect. I speak it sometimes. I like the way the sounds roll off the tongue, rising and falling in lazy circles. “Jiyashtonah,” I answer, Kagoshima slang for “I see,” and keep on walking. The rain is worrying. If the rice gets wet it may rot on the stalk. We must finish harvesting her three fields today.

  Across from the Aiko food store, the small valley of terraced rice paddies spreads out in a mosaic of green and brown where harvested and unharvested fields meet. Nagata-san pushes the teetering wheelbarrow off the main road and down a narrow grass pathway twisting like a brown snake down the slope. Late-maturing fields still wave wet and green. But most paddies, drained of water and shaved of rice, extend in neat rows of brown stubble. Harvested rice, bound in broom-shaped bundles, hangs chest-high over long bamboo poles suspended by props at each end. Each harvested field is full of identical racks of drying rice, bridging the fields in straight lines.

  Though most farmers in Miyama use machines to till, plant and thresh, Nagata-san avoids them. “Kikai? Machines? They’re terrible,” she says. “They tear up the mud, and lose the grain in harvest. No, by hand is much better!” One hundred years ago swaybacked oxen lumbered through the thick mud during planting and harvest. But today the only bovines in Miyama are a herd of white-and-black Holsteins in the small dairy farm on the hill. Some Miyama farmers now use machinery to plant and thresh, but many small farmers like Nagata-san, who plants only three small fields, barter help with friends instead. During the summer she will work alone, weeding, managing the water, and spraying the fields for rice stalk borers, paddy-borers, plant hoppers and rice blight, which, if unattended, would smother the heads of grain in a deadly white film.

  We head across the valley where two bent figures make steady progress across the field of waving yellow. Where they pass, the yellow-green rice falls. The rhythmic swishing of sickles cutting through straw grows louder as we approach. Even under the gray sky the arching blades glint silver. I recognize the pair as Takara-san and Nagai-san, the two old women who had helped in the June rice planting.

  Ohayō. Ohayō. Ohayō.

  We exchange morning greetings. Nagata-san motions for me to join the other women. Sickle in hand, I step down onto the firm mud of the drained paddy. The soil smells rank and sour, a combination of musty old hay and ripe sulfur—Nagata-san’s source of fertilizer is her outhouse. I stand still for a minute, pretending to adjust my gloves while my stomach turns. Dark-eyed Takara-san, the youngest of the three and the most talkative, works toward where I stand. Her upturned face catches my gaze and she flashes a set of gold-filled teeth.

  “Well, you’re back. Didn’t you go back to America to see your parents?” she says quickly. “Did you see Brooke Shields? Did you bring me some Sunkist oranges?”

  “Oh, I’ve been back two weeks now, but my family grows apples, not oranges. Where they live is about as cold as Sapporo.”

  “I see,” answers Takara-san, still smiling. “Well, I’ve never had an American apple.”

  I quickly change the subject. I had been in the States for two weeks. Returning with omiyage, travel souvenirs, was a mandatory gesture. For Eri, who was interested in fashion and design, I had brought copies of Vogue. For Keisuke, studying photography in Tokyo, I had found a book on Ansel Adams. To my teacher I gave a thick art book about the Mimbres Indian pottery of the Southwest, and for Reiko I had purchased an entire deerhide. Half of my luggage had consisted of boxes of maple sugar candy, soaps, university pins, decals, T-shirts and stationery, New York City mementos, postcards of Niagara Falls and assorted towels and key rings. Even so, the presents ran out. “Just don’t tell anyone you ever left,” Reiko said firmly. But within days everyone in the village knew that the yellow-haired apprentice had gone on a trip.

  I step out onto the rice paddy, following Takara-san and doing my best to imitate her swinging movements.

  “That’s not too bad.
Not even young Japanese girls these days know how to harvest rice,” shouts Takara-san. “Why don’t you find a nice Japanese man and settle down here!” She laughs, glancing at me from the corner of her eye as she works. I grunt a noncommittal reply, too busy trying to manage the swinging sickle to converse.

  “Yes, what about omiai?” a quiet voice pipes up on my right. “It’s about time for you to get married, anyway.” Working her way up next to me, Nagai-san is not going to miss out on the fun.

  “Me, an okusan? Muri gowandonah—impossible,” I banter back. “I can’t make miso soup, and I’m hopeless at tea ceremony. And anyhow, I’m not looking for a husband—I’m too busy.”

  Nagai-san giggles softly, her long face hidden by her wide sunbonnet. But Takara-san laughs so hard she misses a swing and her sickle gets stuck in the mud. Across the field Nagata-san, busy setting up props and cross poles to hang the rice, hears the laughter and turns with a dark face. “Hurry up, and stop joking around,” she scolds. “It’s going to rain.”

  The cutters progress in an even horizontal line across the field, felling several clumps of rice with each sweep of their curved blades. I fall into line with Takara-san, working toward her so that when we meet we finish a row and then move on. Underfoot, the rice paddy feels as slippery as a fresh cow pie. Beneath the dark mud lie streaks of clay and russet iron-rich sand dug for centuries by Miyama potters as the crucial ingredient in the deep black glaze for kuromon. Cutting the straw off evenly to leave a clean two-inch stub is a craft requiring skill, not power. I hack at a clump of rice in frustration. The straw bends like flax, scattering rice grains in the mud. I stoop to pick them up and Takara-san catches sight of me. She comes over and demonstrates how to hook a straw clump with the blade’s sharp side and pull upward with a quick tug. A hearty ripping sound, and fallen straw lies flat and even behind her. I try again, and this time, my blade hooks neatly over the base, then cuts through the straw with a loud rip.